Addressing the world's most pressing environmental challenges.
The world faces unprecedented environmental challenges, from climate change, to pollution, to biodiversity loss and species extinction. These challenges have largely been caused by human activity, which since the industrial revolution has been the dominant influence on the environment. With the emergence of the Anthropocene as a geologically recognised epoch, human culture and social practices have become part of the ecosystem itself.
Meeting the challenges posed by the Anthropocene means that we must understand culture as integral to the physical systems of the planet. Representation, creation, figuration and imagination are not only the ways through which the environment features in art, literature, and human culture more broadly—they are factors in its physical and systematic production. Arts & Humanities also speaks crucially to the ethical and moral considerations that must underpin our societies’ response to environmental challenges.
Based in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, and working in collaboration with our PLuS Alliance partners, Arizona State University and the University of New South Wales, the Environmental Humanities Network is a collaboration of disciplines aimed at understanding these and other environmental issues.
Photo by NASA
People
Reader in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature
Professor of Film Studies
Lecturer in Memory Studies
Reader in the History of Science
Projects
Anosmia in Culture and History: Smell Losses/Smell Lessons
A King’s Together-funded multidisciplinary project bringing together researchers from within King’s and beyond to create a unique dialogue around smell loss.
Bees in the medieval world: economic, environmental and cultural perspectives
How cultural ideas of the bee - a potent religious symbol - drove expansive trade in wax and honey and impact on economy and environment.
Cosmological Visionaries: Shamans, Scientists, and Climate Change at the Ethnic Borderlands of China and Russia
Funded by the European Research Council Synergy Grant scheme, Cosmological Visionaries explores what environmental initiatives of the future will look like.
Economic and cultural connections within Mediterranean ecosystems, c.1250-1550
Looking at the environmental history of the Mediterranean, its economic activity and cultural exchange, shedding light on the long-term genesis and management.
Forestscapes
Exploring generative arts-based methods for recomposing collections of sound to support collective inquiry into forests as living cultural landscapes.
Popularizing Palaeontology: Current and Historical Perspectives
From the beginnings of research into earth’s deep history in the late-18th century, extinct animals, lost worlds, and accounts of palaeontological discovery.
SUPERB: Upscaling Forest Restoration
A large and powerful multi-stakeholder network aimed at creating transformative change towards large-scale restoration, part of a major Horizon2020 programme.
Underwater Lives: humans, species, oceans
Relations between humans, marine species and oceans over the last hundred years from an underwater perspective.
Valuing Nature: Histories of everyday engagement with the environment in France, Britain, and their Empires, 1600-present
How has the natural world been valued, and how have different types of engagement with nature and environment been valued?
News
How pop-culture's love for dinosaurs has deepened our understanding of them
From Jurassic Park to Toy Story’s Rex, dinosaurs have always captured our imagination. Dr Chris Manias’ new book delves into the two-way relation between pop...
Listening to forests: new project explores soundscapes as method for ecological research
A new collaboration between the Departments of Geography and Digital Humanities explores how soundscapes can be used as a way to 'attend' to forest life.
Environmental Humanities Network launched to address ‘planetary wellbeing'
The Faculty of Arts and Humanities has launched the Environmental Humanities Network aimed at ‘addressing the past and future of the Anthropocene'.
Events
Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction
Gary Younge & Sadiah Qureshi in Conversation
Please note: this event has passed.
Literary Fieldwork: Archives, the Environment and Black American Fiction
Dr Randi Gill-Sadler will be giving a talk entitled “Literary Fieldwork: Archives, the Environment and Black American Fiction” followed by a conversation with...
Please note: this event has passed.
Palaeontology in Public Launch
Palaeontology in Public: Popular Science, Lost Creatures and Deep Time, available as an open-access pdf.
Please note: this event has passed.
Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis
Join us to celebrate the publication of Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis by Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe.
Please note: this event has passed.
Arks, Vaults, Pods: The Architectures of Climate Survival
From biobanks to cryonics, from frozen zoos to de-extinction programs, Antoine Traisnel explores the architectures of climate survival.
Please note: this event has passed.
People
Reader in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature
Professor of Film Studies
Lecturer in Memory Studies
Reader in the History of Science
Projects
Anosmia in Culture and History: Smell Losses/Smell Lessons
A King’s Together-funded multidisciplinary project bringing together researchers from within King’s and beyond to create a unique dialogue around smell loss.
Bees in the medieval world: economic, environmental and cultural perspectives
How cultural ideas of the bee - a potent religious symbol - drove expansive trade in wax and honey and impact on economy and environment.
Cosmological Visionaries: Shamans, Scientists, and Climate Change at the Ethnic Borderlands of China and Russia
Funded by the European Research Council Synergy Grant scheme, Cosmological Visionaries explores what environmental initiatives of the future will look like.
Economic and cultural connections within Mediterranean ecosystems, c.1250-1550
Looking at the environmental history of the Mediterranean, its economic activity and cultural exchange, shedding light on the long-term genesis and management.
Forestscapes
Exploring generative arts-based methods for recomposing collections of sound to support collective inquiry into forests as living cultural landscapes.
Popularizing Palaeontology: Current and Historical Perspectives
From the beginnings of research into earth’s deep history in the late-18th century, extinct animals, lost worlds, and accounts of palaeontological discovery.
SUPERB: Upscaling Forest Restoration
A large and powerful multi-stakeholder network aimed at creating transformative change towards large-scale restoration, part of a major Horizon2020 programme.
Underwater Lives: humans, species, oceans
Relations between humans, marine species and oceans over the last hundred years from an underwater perspective.
Valuing Nature: Histories of everyday engagement with the environment in France, Britain, and their Empires, 1600-present
How has the natural world been valued, and how have different types of engagement with nature and environment been valued?
News
How pop-culture's love for dinosaurs has deepened our understanding of them
From Jurassic Park to Toy Story’s Rex, dinosaurs have always captured our imagination. Dr Chris Manias’ new book delves into the two-way relation between pop...
Listening to forests: new project explores soundscapes as method for ecological research
A new collaboration between the Departments of Geography and Digital Humanities explores how soundscapes can be used as a way to 'attend' to forest life.
Environmental Humanities Network launched to address ‘planetary wellbeing'
The Faculty of Arts and Humanities has launched the Environmental Humanities Network aimed at ‘addressing the past and future of the Anthropocene'.
Events
Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction
Gary Younge & Sadiah Qureshi in Conversation
Please note: this event has passed.
Literary Fieldwork: Archives, the Environment and Black American Fiction
Dr Randi Gill-Sadler will be giving a talk entitled “Literary Fieldwork: Archives, the Environment and Black American Fiction” followed by a conversation with...
Please note: this event has passed.
Palaeontology in Public Launch
Palaeontology in Public: Popular Science, Lost Creatures and Deep Time, available as an open-access pdf.
Please note: this event has passed.
Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis
Join us to celebrate the publication of Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis by Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe.
Please note: this event has passed.
Arks, Vaults, Pods: The Architectures of Climate Survival
From biobanks to cryonics, from frozen zoos to de-extinction programs, Antoine Traisnel explores the architectures of climate survival.
Please note: this event has passed.
Group leads
Reader in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature
Reader in the History of Science